Indoor Air May be Hazardous to Women’s Health

by Ruth Schechter on 04/18/10 at 11:59 am

Vacuuming the carpet, making the bed, cooking dinner, or using
room freshener may be hazardous to women’s health. These
activities all release potentially harmful allergens and pollutants.
However household air pollution is not regulated, putting
respiratory health at risk.

Indoor air pollution can be up to 10 times worse than outdoor air

pollution because enclosed areas allow pollutants to accumulate.
And because women—including those employed outside the
home—tend to take on the majority of household duties, their risk
of exposure to harmful elements generated during housecleaning
is greater.

“It has long been known that airborne particles can contribute to lung and heart disease,” says Lynn Hildemann,
PhD, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a Clayman Institute faculty research fellow.
“However, regulation of pollutants has focused on outdoor air, even though people in developed countries spend
most of their time indoors.”

Hildemann recently took part in a study that looked at the effects of indoor air pollution on women in villages in
southern Bangladesh. The women cook by burning debris and leaves indoors in crude unvented clay stoves,
creating dense buildups of smoke for several hours a day. Hildemann found that on a daily basis, the women
breathed concentrations of airborne particles that were 15 times greater than the village men, who spend their
time outdoors fishing. She also noted that respiratory illnesses among the very young were prevalent.
“More young children die from respiratory illness there than from diarrheal diseases,” she says. “But parents do
not associate these deaths with smoke exposure, even though the mothers keep their youngest children close by
while they cook.”

While the Bangladesh study was focused on identifying economic incentives for changing cooking methods,
Hildemann became curious as to whether this health disparity between the sexes translated to developed nations.
She tracked down a large-scale U.S. study that compared gender and employment and found that most people
spend about 90 percent of each day indoors. Women tend to spend more time in the home—as much as 12
percent—and 2 to 4 percent more time in the kitchen, the room with the greatest concentration of pollutants from
cooking. Both sexes spend less than 5 percent of their time outdoors.

In a study to assess indoor activity and pollutant exposure, she and her team measured airborne dust levels caused
by vacuuming. “The person doing the vacuuming gets 250 times more exposure to airborne dust than someone
sitting nearby in a chair,” she says. “In fact, dust kicks up even if the vacuum isn’t on.”

An expert in assessing human exposure to air contaminants, Hildemann suggests removing carpets from the home
and staying away from any product with pine or lemon scent, which reacts with other pollutants to create particles
that are easily inhaled. She would also like to see clearer labeling so consumers can decide what products to use,
but regulatory agencies like the Environmental
Protection Agency and OSHA do not oversee quality
controls in the home.

“There is a connection between traditional gender roles

and differences in air pollution exposure,” Hildemann
says. “We need to know more about the relationships
between locations, activities, and pollutant exposure
levels. From there we can figure out how to reduce
indoor exposure to air pollutants.”

Research in southern Bangladesh: for 90

minutes, twice a day, smoke from this cookstove
(woman shown wearing a particle monitor) is at
concentrations that are almost 20 times as high
as the U.S. 24-hr fine particle standard.

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